[Geany-Devel] A direction for Geany

[Lex Trotman]

Hi All,

Recently there have been a number of proposals for significant changes in
Geany, different languages, GObjectification and other various changes.

As good or bad as the individual suggestions may be, they have made it
clear to me that there is no plan for the future of Geany that allows them
to be evaluated effectively.

So I am starting this thread to try to get ideas on where Geany should be
headed.

To start the ball rolling, here are some of the things I see Geany should
aspire to:

1. An architecture that allows multi-threading to be used for non-GUI
tasks.  The most obvious of course is parsing.  At the moment none of the
parsers support symbols in anything other than the global scope, and adding
them would significantly increase the parsing effort, but doing it in a
background thread would make the performance hit less obvious.  But there
needs to be a careful design of the passing of data from the edit buffer to
the parser and back to the symbol tables to minimise overhead, latency and
ensure its non blocking.  With such an architecture other complex
functionality can then also happen in the background without impacting
Geany's responsive feel.

2. Language specific assistance, such as indentation, or dynamic error
marking and intelligent autocompletes.  I consider that these hang off the
previous capability of better parsing/analysis of the program.  Matthew has
demonstrated a prototype that provides some of these facilities using
libclang (for the clang languages only C, C++, Obj-c).  But the current
Geany architecture does not support plugging such things in easily, and
with the number of languages that Geany supports, I would suggest that its
small, light and fast tag would be severely threatened if assistance for
all languages were plugged in at once.

3. Proper portability.  At the moment Geany is really a Linux application
that has some limited (and buggy) support for Windows.  The main editing
widget that Geany uses is available for many platforms and toolkits.  If
Geany had an architecture that separated the target specific parts into a
"backend" the way Scintilla does, then it would be possible to support
multiple targets more easily, making Geany less at the mercy of one
toolkit's direction (that means you deprecating GTK) and better able to
support different platforms like OSX and Windows.  Work such as that
Dimitar is doing for spawning on Windows naturally then falls into such a
backend.

4. Multiple top level windows.  As monitors are cheaper, being able to
spread views of files to optimally utilise the screen space available adds
to the users effectiveness.  Most languages support multiple modules in
different files and many use multiple files for related parts, such as
C/C++ header and body.  Looking at and editing several places/files at once
has many uses.  As useful as splitwindows one and two are (especially
together) they still assume a single rectangular top level is available for
subdivision.  But different desktop menu layouts or having other
applications visible at the same time can limit the contiguous rectangular
space available.  Multiple top levels can make better use of
non-rectangular space.

These are all big changes that don't fall into the current Geany mode of
"light maintenance and extra features as someone implements them".  For big
changes like those above however, a clear design and a planned process is
needed to ensure that the big changes don't clash with each other and that
they are not derailed by interim smaller changes.

I would suggest the process to be:

1. gather other major ideas for capabilities that Geany should plan to
support
2. develop a design that supports these (or at least the most useful ones)
3. look at how that design can be implemented, can the existing design be
mutated to it, or is it a clean framework that large parts of the existing
functionality can plug into, or is it a whole clean implementation.  This
also includes issues like languages to use (C, C++, Vala, Haskell etc).
4. depending on the outcome from 3. use a new repository organisation or at
least a new branch in the existing Geany repo to ensure that the existing
Geany is not destabilised by major changes as they take place.

This is something very different to the way Geany is currently operating,
and I don't know if the community wants to consider such a more structured
approach.  If its felt that its worthwhile then I suggest that steps one
and two are best achieved using the wiki and I will volunteer to set up and
maintain page(s) for those phases at least.

So to summarise, what capabilities should Geany aspire to support, and what
is the process to develop the best software architecture to support those
capabilities.

Cheers
Lex
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